Customer Reviews

The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook)

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am an avid reader with many "favorites," but for years now, this is the book I call my Favorite.

"The Hour of the Star" is special because it works on all levels. The story is compelling. We feel we know the characters and we want to know what happens to them.

But the use of words is Lispector's genius-lyrical, evocative, and perfect.

This is the book I lend to artist friends to show them a masterpiece of words. Any aspiring author will find in "The Hour of the Star" proof that-yes! One can achieve writing in its highest form.

God bless my college professor who assigned this work. It provided me with my most inspired term paper ever, and it has benefited my personal and professional life.

(Because the book is so short, I was able to spend one afternoon on the beach with my future husband, reading it to him in its entirety. At least one of us wept.)

This fantastic work analyzes the meaningless life of a pitiful character, Macabéia, who used to think that since she was alive, she had to live. Life was not something questionable for this character who would accept everything too easily. The whole story is a journey through Macabéia's existence, an everlasting search for the real significance of her living in this world. It is definitely a passionate narrative leading us into examining whether we truly know how to conduct our own lives before it's too late.

Although very brief in length, this irreplaceble eleven-subtitled book (the last by Clarice Lispector) will consistently re-deliver the pleasures of great literature. It will reveal its many bangs to the deserving reader-seer.

This is really a very serious Nietzschean essay on Ontology, sans the uber-machismo but with a deft and well-meant humour, masquerading as a simple little story. Clarice Lispector, our author, is facing her death, and, working through a narrator who may or may not exist, looks into the eyes of a trod upon and anonymous young woman who may exist as an individual or a type and who may or may not be in the narrator's literal or figurative employ, and sees in those eyes her best answer to the questions of being and nothingness that so trouble the philosophical.

Set aside the Sartre, the Heidegger, the Wittgenstein, with all their big words (her narrator emphasizes repeatedly that he has banned big words). Forget about all the twisted logic used to figure out how we know about our own existence and what its purpose may be. If there is a reason, something more than pure brute instinct, for an ugly little waif from the poorest part of Brazil to exist, perhaps even to live, there is a reason for all of us to live. And so, in the midst of life in the mud, and, quite literally, death in the mud, Clarice gives us reason to live. And while she does this, she struggles to release us from the trap of a language that defines us. Each reader can figure out whether she succeeds. Success may or may not be important.

All of this is done through a style dominated by simple aphorisms (thus the Nietzschean - it's the only comparison I can think of) and a straightforward story line. No big words. Individually, her aphorisms are banal. Combined, they are profound.

Clarice Lispector weaves together metaphorical rags.

All I can say about the result: Wow.

A Brazilian friend recommended this book as one of the best novels Brazil had produced. On that basis I read it and was really quite taken by it. The book reads more like poetry than a novel. Every word is carefully chosen to create a desired effect or evoke a particular emotional response in the reader. The plays on words raise profound philosophical questions. This translation into English is adequate but not great. It reads much better in the original Portuguese. This book is not for everyone. If you love great literature and the craft of the novel, you will love this book. If you're looking for an exciting quick read in the style of a bestseller, you will be disappointed. This book is great but it's somewhat of an acquired taste... like a great opera, a fine poem, a sonnet of Shakespeare, etc.

Don't dig into this book expecting something normal. Lispector wasn't a normal writer at all. She wasn't a normal woman. This book was written while her cancer in her uterus was eating her alive, and you can almost taste the angst from the narrator. Not that her other books are any different, but in here it feels even more authentic. Perhaps it's due to the fact that the narrator is ficticious as well. Under the name of Rodrigo S.M., Lispector slashes open her soul and reveals nothing, because that's what it is.

Do not read this book waiting for a story. It tells three stories, the first one being about Macabea. The second story is the narrator talking about his writing, and the craft. The third is the narrator talking about his life.

Some critics claim that Lispector is "existencialism for the masses" (as impossible as that may sound) because she avoids complex theories. She refused to read other existentialist authors, because they were too pompous. Lispector admits that there are no answers to her questions, but that absence does not make the questions dissappear. There are a couple of times where her train of thought is hard to follow, but they came very rarely, and the book is definitely worth it. Saying that she was riding on her reputation shows blatant lack of knowledge on her works. Every other book of hers is written in this sinuous manner, and much of the recognition she has in Brazil was attained shortly after her death, since her books never sold well. After reading this, I can't say I don't understand why. It's not a normal book.

It's hard to decide which part of this book is sadder, Macabea's pathetic existence or the Narrator's angst. But both are awesome. Just don't expect anything normal, and you'll love it.

This book is so good. The depressive life of Macabea, so sadthat even the Narrator struggles to avoid the story but can't. Checkout the movie, too.

In her final novel, Brazilian novelist/poet Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977) writes an eerie, almost supernatural tale of Macabea, a nineteen-year-old woman almost devoid of opinion, thoughts, and even feelings. Her story is being told by Roderigo S.M., a writer, similarly isolated, without a long-term idea of what he wants to write, though he says, as he begins the story, that he has "glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl [Macabea]." He tells the reader that "This isn't just narrative, it's above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes," he states, leaving the reader in somewhat of a quandary trying to figure out what he is talking about.

In telling Macabea's story, however, the narrator discovers that he himself has a kind of destiny, and that "the action of this story will end up with my transformation into somebody else. Initially, though, the novel recreates the narrator's maunderings as he tries to get started and wonders what to say. "Will things happen? They will. But what things? I don't know that either." He recognizes the importance of keeping things simple in writing, though "I know splendid adjectives, meaty nouns, and verbs so slender that travel sharp through the air." Macabea lives aimlessly, he says, and that "if she was dumb enough to ask herself `who am I?' she would fall flat on her face...[She is] so dumb that she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don't even see her."

Having grown up poor in the northeast of Brazil, Macabea lived with her "sanctimonious aunt," who rapped her on the head, beat her, and more importantly (to her), sometimes deprived her of daily dessert, and she has developed into a person so unthinking that she "didn't wonder why she was always being punished." Now, having moved to Rio, she never worries about her ignorance because she does not recognize it. What she does "know" for certain is that at the hour of death, a person "becomes a shining movie star, it's everyone's moment of glory, and it's when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks."

On the morning of May seventh, however, "the unexpected ecstasy for her tiny little body [arrives]" and she falls in love with Olimpico de Jesus Moreira Chaves, but even together they "cast little shadow upon the ground." Several pages of their conversations are among the most amazing writing imaginable - neither Macabea nor Olimpico has a clue as they try to find some level of interest in something - anything! - which will allow them to talk. The results are both hilarious and pathetic. A trip to a fortune teller and its aftermath provide the turning point, and irony builds upon irony as the author explores who we are, how we know, how we fit into the grand scheme of life, and ultimately, whether there actually is any "grand scheme." In this odd but peculiarly thought-provoking novel, the reader may often be as confused and conflicted as the narrator, but after a slow start, I became enchanted with it. Here two complete negatives, Macabea and author Roderigo, have created a bizarre positive. Ultimately, Roderigo asks, "What was the truth of my Maca? As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed, I ask: What is? Reply: it's not." Mary Whipple

I had never heard of Lispector before stumbling, by chance, across a review of a biography of her in the NYT Book Review section. The name of the biography is "Why this World?." My sense of it was that I would have to read this author. I chose, as a beginning, the last book she had written, "The Hour of the Star." It was overpowering.

Was it a novel? Hard to say. It seems to use the medium of a quasi-novel to engage painful truths which most of us ignore. Lispector, ultimately, is writing to, for, about, and against God. She is merciless in her exposition. Even God is seeking shelter from her pen.

It is a short work. It can be handled in one sitting if you have the emotional strength to do so.

This book was readily available. Her other productions, at least the ones I have been attempting to get my hands on, are very hard to obtain. I hope the biography which I menitoned above leads to re-issuings of her work. By the way I am now reading, in lieu of Lispector herself, that "Why this World?" It is very well written and immensely informative.

Lispector's work is great on this book!
And it's interesting to read about how misearable some people are and they don't realise that! It's a great story to reflect on our own lives!